Nasty, spiky, upper mid resonances

On a vocal I’m often using a bit of Soothe 2 as well as some surgical notching with ProQ3. I haven’t heard of the Deres plug. A lot like Soothe 2?

Considering how many wonderful vocals have been recorded without any “instances” of anything, let’s not (at first) try to solve this artificially with plug ins.

Is it every vocalist? If so then if you go in the tracking room do you hear the blemishes acoustically in the room? If not then it might be the choice of mic/placement or possibly other underperforming , non-real gear in the signal path. But If you do hear it in the room, then attack those acoustics. Much better return on investment.

I can't imagine eliminating these completely. I'm sure there is a lot that can be done before plugins but I deal with some amount of these pretty much all the time. It's in the vocal perhaps, or a certain resonance in the room(maybe it's already treated) the mic itself, the piano, the guitar. If everything to be done has been tried, then I like q10, the Tokyo Dawn De-Edger and Soothe. Or automate a band in Fabfilter. I had a recording I was mixing where only 3 times in the track a certain note was sung and 1729hz just showed up real narrow and annoying. Usually I'll find some of these on occassional sources and notch with q10 about 3-6db. I just want to reduce it. Rarely do I kill it because things start to sound weird if you do that. Just want to make it a part of the sound. I have found on certain sounds that reducing these a bit remove masking and you can really hear the instrument beautifully then.

I suggest, (example) take a room full of people, when a woman comes up to you and whispers in your ear you hear clear as day, lip smacking, mouth noises, loads of sibilance and proximity. When someone talks to you across the same room, you point your chin up and try to get your ears above everyone's head so the intelligible frequency range can get to your ears without being absorbed by people and atmosphere, treble and sibilance freq's don't travel well through objects and atmosphere, eating a mic or close micing an instrument is actually an unnatural listening experience, we mostly talk to people starting about 3 feet away, we listen to people play guitar from a decent distance, unless you are a close talker guitar player😂

So what i'm trying to say is, try backing off the mic and the sibs and trebs won't get to the mic so easily and freq's will naturally compress, vox and instruments, this way you shouldn't see resonances and spikes as much either, the only thing that can stop you from success with this is a noisy room IME

I would stay away from the center of the room when possible. John, having seen pics of your room, I’d be interested to hear how your voice capture changes if you set the mic up farther away from mix position - moved toward the back wall more, like around the 1/4 to 1/3 of the way into the room area. And singing out into the room, toward your desk.

My room has symetrical treatment... my mix position is around 38% into the room longwise.... it's where I track MY vocals.... essentially the mix position..

The other end of the room is where I track others....and I have tracked there over the years...both positions are around 38% in. Both have a cloud above them.

Looking at your room Johnkenn I don't know what I would do....other than move around and test....

To be frank though....I don't hear anything bad in ANY vocal you have posted....I am always just (jealously) listening to your voice.... 8)

cheers

Wiz

Thanks for the reply. I'm well aware that many vocals have been recorded without a plugin.

Exactly the way I've done it for the 17 years I've been in this house. I actually just put the mic closer to one of the baffles and sang directly at it, perpendicular to the room, and it was mucn, much, much better.

I usually sing a foot foot and a half away...but like all singers, I'm a sucker for proximity effect. But you look at all the old pics at Capitol and the mic's hanging down and the singers are like 5 feet away. I need to try that some...scoot back and raise the pre.

Do it and let us know JK, I'm a distance guy, I rarely record an acoustic guitar closer than 2' away, and i think you've heard some of the sounds i've gotten, not bad if i say so myself😆 (i do have a quiet space though)

Very true, though not much headbasket resonance on John’s 017